


Punishment

by sharkie335



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crying, M/M, Punishment, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 20:40:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5679964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkie335/pseuds/sharkie335
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is punishing himself for what happened with Bucky.  Sam is tired of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punishment

**Author's Note:**

> Beta’d and made much better by Poisontaster who pointed out that it wasn’t quite done.
> 
> This is not happen fun BDSM times. That is not the point of this piece. It is, however, completely consensual.

Sam and Steve had been sleeping together for six months. Well, Sam _said_ sleeping together, but Steve never slept in the same bed as Sam. It wasn’t that Steve didn’t sleep - though that was part of it. And it wasn’t that Steve seemed ashamed of what they did together. But when they were done, Steve would only accept so much affection for so long before he would become visibly uncomfortable and excuse himself, usually to go to the gym and break some heavy bags.

He had thought that finding Bucky would help, that Steve would let himself relax and enjoy life again, especially since Bucky seemed to be recovering well. But every time Bucky had a bad day, Steve would be back in the gym, beating his hands bloody. Or if he remembered something and Bucky didn’t. Or… or… or… It never seemed to end, the list of things that Steve would punish himself for.

The night that Sam found Steve in the gym, grimly wrapping his hands so that the bones would set straight, he decided that he’d had enough. He was going to have to try something other than sympathetic looks and great blowjobs.

They spent the next three days chasing down another Hydra cell, and when they got back to the Tower, Bucky was a shivering wreck from worry. Sam understood why the other Avengers didn’t feel that Bucky should join them just yet - though he wasn’t sure that they weren’t doing more harm than good by keeping him away from Steve when Steve was going into dangerous situations.

But right now, Bucky wasn’t Sam’s problem. _Steve_ was. And he was going to try something different just as soon as he got Steve alone.

Sam didn’t begrudge Steve staying with Bucky the night they got back - Bucky only seemed to calm when he could actually see Steve, and the man had been through enough trauma. By breakfast, though, he seemed more relaxed, even joking a bit with everyone around the table and not visibly choking down panic when Steve went back into the kitchen to make another omelette.

So, after lunch, when Steve appeared as relaxed as he ever got, Sam gave him a leer and suggested that they go listen to some music in Sam’s rooms. 

Never slow on the uptake, Steve was already stripping out of his shirt before Sam finished closing the door. “Whoa, big guy - what’s the rush?” he asked, pointedly taking a seat on the sofa.

“Uh…” Steve stuttered for a moment. “You said ‘listen to some music’ and that usually means that you want to fuck, and I certainly could go for it.” 

“Well, yes, that is what I usually mean,” Sam said with a quick grin, dropping it just as fast to try and get Steve to understand that he was actually aiming for serious. “But I thought we might talk for a minute first, and maybe give something new a try.” He was counting on the fact that Steve was braver and more open to new experiences than anyone born in the ‘teens had any right to be, but he had to try _something_.

Steve smiled back at him, apparently missing what Sam was trying to telegraph. Not surprising as body language had apparently changed quite a bit in seventy years, and Steve was catching up faster than anyone had any right to expect, but some things he hadn’t caught yet. And besides, new sex things certainly seemed to be things that he enjoyed. “Okay. What do you have in mind?”

Time to be clearer, Sam thought. “Well, first of all, I may break some of the mood, but I need a serious answer to a question. Are you still blaming yourself for what happened to Bucky?”

Steve looked down and to the right, and Sam knew just as certain as he knew his grandmother’s recipe for cherry pie that Steve was getting ready to lie to him. “No. I know that there was nothing I could have done. I had no way of knowing that Bucky could survive that fall.” Picking up his shirt, Steve started to pull it back on.

“You know, you say that every time someone asks, but I don’t think you actually believe it,” Sam said, reaching out to loop his fingers through the belt loops of Steve’s jeans. “I think, in your heart and your gut, that you know you’re lying when you say that, and that you think you should have been a miracle worker and figured it out.”

Sam tugged lightly, not pulling any harder when Steve resisted. He also shut his mouth and let Steve think about his words, because he needed Steve on the same page if this was going to work, and nagging him about it wasn’t going to help. If he couldn’t admit it today, Sam would wait and try again later.

The silence stretched, brittle and thin, and finally snapped when Steve blurted out, “Yeah, okay, I blame myself. I know it doesn’t make any sense. Even _Bucky_ has told me to stop. But if I’d just _looked_ for him, maybe this could have all been avoided.”

Sighing, Sam tugged again, unsurprised when this time Steve took a stumbling step forward, stopping between Sam’s spread thighs. “That’s what I thought. And I know that telling you that you’re not to blame again is probably pointless, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Steve’s mouth was turned down at the corners, and he was looking at anything that wasn’t Sam, like he didn’t want to face what he’d said head on.

“I have a suggestion,” Sam said. “Since you won’t even believe yourself when you admit that there was nothing you could have done, how about I punish you for it instead? Maybe that will get it through your head.”

“Punish me? Like what, stand in a corner?” Steve scoffed. “Or a ‘time-out’ like they do with little kids?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how kids were punished when you _were_ one,” Sam said evenly. “We both know by today’s standards, those punishments were abuse, but I bet they set their roots deep in you, and they might work.”

“Well, not me so much. My ma was always afraid that I’d get hurt, so I usually had things taken away - like paper for drawing. But Bucky and his sister? Yeah, his father would clobber them pretty good when they didn’t behave.”

“What did he clobber them with, Steve? His belt?” Sam worked hard to keep the judgment out of his voice. While he was fine with adults consenting to that kind of thing, it made him hot under the collar to think of kids being beaten, even almost a hundred years later.

“Yeah, usually. Sometimes just the back of his hand.”

“I know it’s not actual possible for me to _injure_ you with my hand - or even my belt - but I bet I could make it _hurt_. And then maybe you’d stop hurting yourself when you think about what happened to Bucky.”

Steve still wasn’t actually looking at Sam, but he _was_ looking thoughtful, like the idea intrigued him. So Sam shut his mouth and tugged again, pulling Steve flush against his inner thighs. 

Silence filled the room for several very long minutes, and Sam had to choke down the instinct to take it back, to apologize, to just going back to pretending that Steve wasn’t hurting himself because he couldn’t hurt the people that had hurt Bucky, because he hadn’t been able to protect his best friend. That was not working, and they had to try something different. If Steve wouldn’t accept this idea, Sam was flat out.

Finally Steve lifted his head and met Sam’s gaze squarely. “All right.”

It had been long enough that Sam had to shake himself back into the here and now to respond. “All right… what? We’re going to try this? You’re going to go back to blaming yourself? What exactly are you agreeing to?”

Steve blushed, but he said evenly, “All right, I’ll let you punish me, and we’ll see if that gets me through some of this.”

“Great,” Sam said. “Okay, first things first. Take your clothes off.”

“ _Now_ you’re in a hurry,” Steve said, his voice laced with good humor. “Keep ‘em on, take ‘em off, you’re just full of orders.” But even as he said it, he took two steps back and started pulling his shirt back off.

Sam stood up as soon as he had space, and backed a little bit away from Steve. He very pointedly kept his clothes on.

Steve realized that Sam wasn’t undressing while he was sitting down to unlace his sneakers. “Um, why are you still wearing clothes?” It was a reasonable question - Sam was usually naked before Steve, since he didn’t mind kicking his shoes off or leaving his clothes a tangle on the floor.

“Because this isn’t about sex.” Sam made sure to look Steve in the eye. “Sometimes, things like this _are_ about sex, and if you want to try that sometime, we can. But right now, it’s not. It’s about an internal pain that we’re going to try to externalize so that we can try to neutralize it. And for that, you don’t need me naked.”

“I always need you naked,” Steve joked a little, but there was a nervous quaver to his voice that meant that Sam’s seriousness was sinking in. Good. He hated wasted effort.

As soon as Steve was naked, his clothes neatly folded on the couch, Sam leaned forward and tugged him down into a soft, gentle, mostly-chaste kiss. “This is not because I’m mad at you, or because you’re a bad person,” he said. “I need you to remember that. Okay?”

“You’re not mad and I’m not bad,” Steve repeated. “What do you want me to do?”

Sam took Steve by the hand and led him around the back of the sofa. “Bend over the back and put your hands on the seat,” he said, completely unsurprised when Steve did it without any apparent effort. “Keep your hands there, no matter what. If it becomes too much, for any reason - because it hurts too much,” Sam ignored Steve’s quiet scoff at that, “or because it’s doing bad things in your head, you say red. If you need a moment to recover or to think, you say yellow, okay?”

“Okay,” Steve said.

“No, repeat it back to me,” Sam insisted. 

Sam could _hear_ Steve rolling his eyes, but he didn’t really care, because Steve dutifully repeated, “I’ll say red if it’s too much, and yellow if I need a moment. Can we do this already?”

“Okay,” Sam said, taking a deep centering breath. Normally he’d start a spanking with his hand, and gently, but that wouldn’t accomplish the goal that he was setting out to accomplish. So instead, he slipped his belt out of the loops, noting that Steve tensed slightly at the sound but didn’t move otherwise.

Folding the belt over, he laid one hand on Steve’s low back, and brought the belt down as hard as he could, right over the center of Steve’s ass.

“Ow, _fuck_ , Steve said, pushing back up to a standing position. “That fucking hurt!”

Sam had expected pretty much that exact reaction, so he wasn’t surprised. “That’s kind of the point, Steve.” Sam pushed lightly on Steve’s back. “Unless you’re already going to give me a red, bend back over.”

Instead of obeying, Steve twisted to meet Sam’s eyes. “You honestly think this will work?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said, knowing that it was the truth, and possibly just how desperate he was for it to work, would bleed through in his voice. “But nothing else is working, so we’re going to give it a try.”

Steve appeared to think that over for a moment, but then said, “I guess,” and slowly bent back over, putting his hands back on the sofa cushion.

He didn’t ask if Steve was ready. Instead, he pulled back and laid another stripe, trying to be as close to the first one as he could. This time Steve grunted, but he didn’t move or say anything, so Sam started to really lay into him.

Stripe after stripe went down, turning Steve’s ass pale pink and then red, almost shading to purple in a few places. Sam wasn’t worried about damage - any bruising he left would be gone within an hour or two - but he was starting to wonder if this was going to do anything but wear Sam’s arm out. 

So he changed tactics. Instead of spreading the hits over Steve’s whole ass, he started to concentrate on the lower third, right where it met Steve’s thighs. After the fifth or sixth, Steve actually made a noise louder than a grunt. Instead, he said, “Fuck,” again, softly this time. He started to repeat it every time that Sam brought the belt down, getting louder each time, until finally, he said, “Fuck, okay, yellow, ow, fuck!”

Sam immediately stopped, setting the belt on the back of the couch and coming around so that he was standing directly behind Steve, both hands resting on his low back. “Steve? What do you need?”

Steve was breathing hard, and Sam would have said that it sounded wet, like Steve was fighting tears. “I don’t - it’s like, I can see where this is supposed to go, but I can’t get there, Sam.”

“So, what? Do you need it harder?”

Shaking his head, Steve said, “No, not that. I think - you know what I’m thinking when I blame myself, right? I know I’ve never told you, but I bet you can guess.” 

“I have a pretty good idea. That you’re stupid, that you’re worthless, that you should have tried harder, been _better_. The same kind of things that I used to think about Riley. Is that pretty close?”

With a deep shuddering breath, Steve said, “Yeah. Tell me that while you’re hitting me. You said the whole point was to externalize it, right? Well, externalize _all_ of it.”

Sam wasn’t sure about the wisdom of that, but this had been his idea, and he wasn’t going to tell Steve that he was wrong - hell, if anyone knew what was going on in Steve’s head, it would be him, so there was a good chance he was right. It was at least worth a shot.

“I can try that,” Sam said. “You need to not hesitate to safeword if it starts to screw you up in the head even worse. Got it?”

“Got it.” Some of the tension in Steve’s back drained out, leaving him loose limbed and limp over the back of the sofa. Sam picked the belt back up and turned again, leaving his left hand on Steve’s back, giving him a quick caress before he slammed the belt down. “Stupid,” he said. “Couldn’t save your best friend.”

SLAM “Pretended that you were a superhero while your friend was being tortured and forced to kill.”

SLAM “Weak in every way that matters.”

SLAM “If you’d been better, you could have saved Bucky.”

SLAM “You just didn’t try _hard_ enough.”

Hearing something suspiciously like a sob, he stopped talking for a moment, bringing the belt down hard four times in rapid succession. Yes, that was definitely what he was hearing. 

He dropped the belt.

Going behind Steve again, he leaned forward and wrapped his hands around Steve’s chest, urging him up and into a standing position. Under his hands, Steve was weeping, crying in a way that Sam thought was about ninety years overdue. “Shh,” he whispered. “You did good, Steve. It’s all over, you’re done.”

“But - but,” Steve whispered.

“No, no buts,” Sam said. “You’re done. You’ve been punished. You did good, got it all out like an infection. Now it’s time to just let it go.” He gently urged Steve to turn around.

It was unfortunate that Steve was so much taller, because it made it difficult for Sam to wrap him up the way he needed. So he improvised, pulling Steve’s head down to rest on his shoulder, his arms tight around Steve’s back, pulling him in hard and close.

Through it all, Steve kept crying like a child, no artifice or art to it, just heartbroken sobs that sounded like they’d never end.

But no one could keep it up forever, and gradually Steve’s sobbing slowed to the occasional gasp in his breathing. When that happened, Sam slowly released his grip on Steve, ready to pull him back if it seemed necessary. When Steve straightened without relapsing into tears. Sam reached up and brushed away some of the tear tracks on his face. 

“Better?” he asked.

“I… I _think_ so,” Steve answered. 

“Good. Let’s move this to the couch.” Sam circled back around to the front and flopped down, and giggled at the look on Steve’s face. “I know you can’t actually sit down comfortably. Come on, lie down and put your head in my lap.”

Steve slowly eased himself down on the couch, wincing a little when his ass hit the cushion, and made small noises as he swung his legs up and laid back, putting his head in Sam’s lap. Once he was settled, though, he seemed to relax.

Sam wrapped one arm around Steve’s chest, pulling him in close, while his other hand stroked through his hair. “You did really well,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

“I cried like a baby,” Steve said flatly, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve been shot, I’ve been tortured, and you hitting me with a belt and telling me I’m a fuck up made me cry like a baby.”

“Hey, look at me,” Sam said. When Steve continued to stare at the ceiling, Sam stroked a hand down his cheek and pulled a little, urging him to turn his head. “It’s not the amount of pain, Steve. It’s what the pain brought up in your head. You’re right - you’ve been hurt worse. And I’d be grateful if you didn’t do that anymore, by the way. But this wasn’t about me hurting you, entirely. It was about a punishment that you felt like you needed.”

Steve bit his lip, and between that and the remaining tear tracks on his face, he looked about twelve. “You sure?”

“Nah, man, I’m never _sure_. But I have a good feeling about this.” Sam continued to run his fingers through Steve’s hair. “You’ve been punished for what you perceived as a fuck up. Now you can let it go, right?

“I’ll try.” Steve closed his eyes and visibly controlled his breathing, taking slow deep breaths and letting them out just as slowly.

“That’s all any of us can ask you for,” Sam said.

For a while, they just sat in silence, Sam petting and soothing Steve, Steve passively letting Sam give him affection, which was rare in and of itself. Sam hoped that it was a sign that things in Steve’s head were settling down.

Eventually, Steve’s eyes fluttered open. “Sam?”

“Hmm?”

“Why would people choose to do that? Other than like I just did, I mean? Most grown ups get over needing to be spanked for being bad.” 

“Well, first of all, not always. And secondly, some people just enjoy it. You might be one of those people - who knows? I am, sometimes.”

“How the hell would anyone enjoy that?”

Sam grinned at Steve. “I’ll show you sometime. When your ass isn’t bruised, okay?”

“I’ll take you up on that offer.”


End file.
